If security at universities isn't for students, who is it for?

The London student president was arrested yesterday outside his union building for "failing to notify police of a procession", and has now been bailed with conditions banning him from protesting about anything within half a mile of any university.

Update: 14/11/2013:

Around midday on Thursday the 14th of November, whilst coming back from a university meeting, University of London Union president and OurKingdom contributor Michael Chessum was arrested by the Metropolitan police outside of the union building on Malet street. According to staff at the union, his crime was "failing to notify the police of a procession". This related to a demonstration the previous day, in which a group of students marched around the university campus "They didn't even go on the street" the staff member says, they "stayed on pathways and pedestrianised areas". Michael was held at Holborn Police Station, where students will be demonstrating at 16:30.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed that a 24 year old man was arrested today, under Section 11 of the Public Order Act, and is currently
in custody at a central London police station. Section 11 requires organisers of processions to inform the police beforehand. The Met said that there had been about 160 people at the demonstration yesterday, which they had broken up because permission to walk together across their campus had not been sought by the students.

Update 2 - 14/11/2013

Michael Chessum has now been released, but his bail conditions ban him from protesting on, or within half a mile of, any university campus, despite his job as University of London student president often requiring him to take part in such events - see the bail slip below:

Michael Chessum's bail conditions

Here is the piece we ran on Thursday the 7th of November:

Students arrested for inadvertently being in the same building as
Princess Anne, heavy handed policing of careers fair protests - if
universities aren't for students, who are they for?

On Tuesday,
a group of students at Sheffield university decided to protest
against the presence of arms companies at a careers fair at their
university. Footage
filmed by the student paper shows what happened. After lying,
covered in fake blood, in the middle of the fair, a number of them
were dragged across the floor and out of the room with some force, and sustained cuts and
bruises.

The
story led to some controversy, and was tweeted by a number of
prominent journalists and activists. The idea that arms manufacturers
have more right to a place on a university campus than student
activists is a dangerous one, as is the notion that security guards
ought to be able to use force on students any more than you or I are. University campuses
ought primarily to be for students and academics, for learning and
research – with all of the mess and debate that entails – not
pristine air conditioned cells for corporate recruitment.

But
this isn't the first time that these issues have arisen this academic
year. Earlier this semester, two Edinburgh University students -
Hona-Luisa Cohen-Fuentes and Euan Kidston - were sat in the
university's iconic Georgian Old College building, studying. Hona
says she was reading Peter Van Inwag's essay “changing
the past”, and was wearing “a
long blue skirt and a pink flowery shirt and a bowler hat”.

Euan
described to me what happened next: “a janitor and servitor
(the people employed by the university to run their buildings)
aggressively
demanded to see identification and called security....”

“The
janitor demanded to know who I was and what I was doing, and said the
whole building was closed.”

Euan explained that he was a
student, and was studying, and showed his student card. Hona didn't
have her student ID on her. The
students say the university employed security guards then attempted
to prevent them from leaving the building, including by physically
pushing Euan and trying to hold him down, and blocking Hona's way.
Hona says that the security shouted at her, including mentioning that
the police were coming. She told them that if she was arrested, she
might be deported, and one of them replied: “I hope you are”.

The
students, aware that university employees had no right to detain
them, managed to escape through a back exit, and left the building.
Outside they were stopped by officers from Police Scotland.

They
were asked to wait in the quadrangle for what Hona says was about an
hour, and the police explained what was going on: the new university
Chancellor, Princess Anne, was borrowing an office in the building
for the day. Euan and Hona are both involved in the student union,
which has policy condemning the process which led to The Princess
Royal's appointment to the position.

After about an hour, in which time Euan says that he also saw at least twenty
armed royal protection officers, the two students were handcuffed,
put in the back of a police van, and driven to the nearby (and
famous) Saint Leonard Street Police Station.

Once
there, they say they were read their rights, held in separate police
cells, had DNA swabs taken from their cheeks, and searched by a bomb
expert who had been called in from Edinburgh airport. They say they
were prevented from washing their hands when they went to the toilet.
This may, they say they were told, destroy evidence in the form of
traces of explosives. Hona says that the police also said that the
students' fingerprints would be searched against a terrorist
database, though in the end, their prints were never taken. Four and
a half hours later, they were released without charge.

Euan said a week later
he was “ok-ish now” but that he had “been a bit sick and
stressed the past few days dealing with it all”.

A
Police Scotland spokesman said: "During a security check at an
Edinburgh University venue on Tuesday 8th October two people were
found within a restricted area and were subsequently detained.

"They
were later released without charge."

The
same day, a couple of streets away, the university careers fair was
going on. As has happened every year for at least a decade, students
were protesting against one of the companies there – this year, like their
friends in Sheffield this week, it was a company providing tools of war.

In
the past, the routine has always been pretty familiar. Students show
up, they find an amusing way to protest against the companies they
most objected to, and after a while, university security arrive and
ask them to leave. At this point, they'd take their protest outside.

This
year, though, it was different. What happened was described by
one of the students involved, Amabelle Crowe.

When
students arrived at the careers fair, she says, the police were
already there. She and one other student went inside and stood by the
stall of Babcock International – the private defence company they
had chosen to protest against. They handed out leaflets, held up a
banner reading “warning, arms companies at work, this is not OK”
and spoke to their fellow students.

The Edinburgh careers fair, with fake police tape and a leafleting student

Soon,
three police officers arrived – two men, one woman. One of the men,
Amabelle thinks, was a sergeant. They asked the students to move. The
students said that they weren't blocking the way to the stall, and
that they had a right to be there. The police officers then
threatened the students with breach of the peace, and told them that
they had to give them their details so that this 'crime' could be
investigated.

History
doesn't relate whether they also discussed the matter of peace with
the military company involved.

The following day, the careers
fair still going on, it was RBS who were targeted by students. When
they got there, the police were again waiting. When they left,
Amabelle tells me, officers again demanded that the students identify
themselves. The students replied that, in the UK, people have no
legal obligation to do so. The police responded that they were
required to under the terrorism act. Again, Amabelle outlined the
conversation:

Amabelle: “Are
you genuinely saying that you think we are terrorists?”

Police officer: “yes,
I suspect you of being a terrorist”.

The
four police officers present took the details of the four students
they apparently suspected of being terrorists.

Back in
January, another Edinburgh student says she was walking to a bus
stop on campus when she saw a surprising number of police officers.
She took a photo of them. One of the officers, she says, then
followed her and physically blocked her from getting onto her bus.
The student secretly recorded the conversation that followed. One
officer demanded that she give them her details, and, when she
refused, he said she was legally obliged to. He then claimed
that she had witnessed a robbery and so was required to give them her
name and address under Section 13 of the Criminal Procedure
(Scotland) Act 1995. She later established through a Freedom of
Information Request that that was a lie. No robbery was reported
in the area that day.

The photo taken by the student

The
truth was that the officers were there, again, to protect Princess
Anne. In this case, the student was relatively familiar with the law.
She complained to the police, and was told that the officer involved
was disciplined. How many students have been similarly treated on
their own campuses but not complained is, of course, impossible to
know. Most don't have the legal knowledge to challenge a lying police
officer, nor the experience of the police to see the value in
recording what they say.

The
University of Edinburgh, commented on these
incidents:

“We
take campus security very seriously and work closely with students
and the police when necessary.

“Our first
thoughts are always the security and wellbeing of our students, staff
and visitors to the University.

“If anyone has
a concern about the way in which we seek to ensure campus security,
we have a complaints procedure that is designed to ensure that any
grievances are properly investigated and are given careful and fair
consideration.”

Police Scotland
were contacted about these incidents, but said that they could not
contact the officers involved. When provided with their badge
numbers, they didn't get back.

It's not just Edinburgh and
Sheffield. Students at the University of East Anglia complained of an
unusually “heavy police presence” during freshers' week this
year, with one student there saying that he felt “intimidated” by
them.

Similarly, there were controversies
around a police drugs raid at Royal Holloway Student Union earlier
on the 27th
of September, with students claiming that the police singled out
black students and student union sabbaticals condemning the action as
“deeply concerning” and saying they are investigating claims of
racial profiling, and students saying that they felt intimidated. The vice-president of the University of London
Union ended up being arrested during the raid, after he apparently
attempted to “obstruct the search of two black students”. The
police say they searched those students to whom drug-sniffer dogs
responded, but that no drugs were found.

Some students are responding to what they see as a broken relationship with the police. Last academic year,
the council – elected student representatives - of the Birmingham
University Guild of Students passed a policy saying that police
officers should only be allowed into the Guild building with the
explicit permission of the elected democratic leadership. This policy
was, however, over-ruled by the board of trustees of the Guild, which
includes Emma Thompson – an
officer with the Westmidlands Police and chair of the Police
Association of Higher Education Liaison Officers.

Students
at SOAS are luckier. One of them got in touch to say that, when two
of their friends had been trailed on the way back to the campus from
a protest last month, they were able to tell the police stalking them
that they weren't welcome on the campus. SOAS students have what they
call a “cops not welcome” policy. Greece used
to have a law banning the police from all university campuses.
Tensions in the UK haven't reached that stage yet, but the conflict
which flared during the 2010 student protests is still alive.

Universities
exist to advance and disseminate human knowledge. This means that
they don't exist to drive profits or recruitments for large
companies, nor to pay homage to the royal family. Sweeping aside
students' rights and voices – including their right sometimes to
complain about what's happening at their campus in ways which are a bit inconvenient, means sweeping aside
the very purpose of these institutions.

When this is
done in the name of large corporations, it tells us something very worrying
about contemporary universities and whose interests it is they feel the need to prioritise. Who is protected from whom is a very easy way to tell who and what an institution cares about most. If university security officers are starting to see students not as those they are protecting, but those they are guarding against, then who is it that universities are there for?

More generally, university administrations - run usually by white middle class and
middle aged academics - might not see a tension between the police and
security guards on the one hand, and students on the other. But many
students - particularly, those who aren't white, and those who have ever
been on a protest, often feel differently.

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